


And We Keep On Wanting

by nekare



Category: Dreamer Trilogy - Maggie Stiefvater, Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Adam Parrish is Bad at Feelings, College Student Adam Parrish, Dream Magic, Idiots in Love, Long-Distance Relationship, M/M, Oral Sex, Phone Sex, Post CDTH, Post-Canon, Ronan Lynch Visits Adam Parrish at College/University, adam at harvard, magical underworld, that was a tag already i love you all
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-22
Updated: 2020-08-22
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:22:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25993615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nekare/pseuds/nekare
Summary: He last saw Ronan for Spring Break a week ago, and more than quenching the thirst it’d just made the longing worse. They’d spent most of the break dicking around in Lindenmere, creating tiny planets in bubbles for Opal to chase and fucking in shadowy clearings. Adam can almost taste Ronan and the magic both like honey lingering in his mouth.Or, Adam’s sophomore year at Harvard: a study in longing.
Relationships: Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish
Comments: 21
Kudos: 248





	And We Keep On Wanting

**Author's Note:**

> This is set in a nebulous post-CDTH future in which everyone is happy and accounted for, which will probably be jossed to all hell by this time next year.

The air feels crisp enough to cut in early November, but Adam doesn’t move closer to the fire Ronan is building up a few feet away. Instead, he puts his head back and looks at the night sky he never thought he’d miss up in Cambridge, the dark void and the infinite pinpricks of light dotting the velvet sky. 

He has only been home for a few hours, all of them spent with a hovering Opal that insisted on coming back from Lindenmere for the weekend as soon as she knew of Adam visiting. They had spent hours burning marshmallows and drinking spiked hot chocolate as Opal and Chainsaw chased each other around them, fighting for the last remains of slightly scorched crackers. Opal had finally fallen asleep, tired and cranky after the sugar rush, and Adam had spread a blanket on the damp grass as he waited for Ronan to come back from putting her to bed. 

Now that Ronan’s back and muttering curses at the cold, Adam almost wants to drag the moment for longer, anticipation building in his stomach as he keeps his gaze heavenwards. 

A series of scheduling fuck-ups and both dream and farm emergencies mean that this is the first time they’ve seen each other since school started at the beginning of September, the longest they’ve gone since they got together. Just being around each other again feels electric, and when Adam finally looks down from the stars to stare at Ronan he has to bite his lip with how bright and hungry he looks as he stares back, crouching by the fire. He’s all angles and shadows in the flickering light, and Adam is left frozen in place with want as Ronan stands up and walks towards him.

Ronan is already reaching for his hips as he stalks closer, dragging him bodily into a kiss that turns his knees liquid, that goes from 0 to 60 in a second as Ronan opens Adam’s mouth with his tongue, dirty and unrestrained, past teasing and straight into devouring him whole. Ronan’s nose digs into Adam’s cheek and Ronan’s hands dig into the dimples on his back and Adam feels soaringly, gloriously alive, dream cicadas singing over his head and Ronan’s prickly hair under his hands as he pulls him closer by the back of his skull.

Ronan feels desperate and hungry, finally alone and finally touching after so long. Adam knows he’s clinging just as hard, kissing just as punishing. The only thing he can smell is Ronan, Ronan, _Ronan._

Ronan disentangles with a bite to Adam’s lower lip, followed by a sharper one to his jaw, before dropping to his knees. Adam manages a weak noise of surprise before Ronan is tugging at his belt and pulling his zipper down, and a second later Ronan is taking him whole into his hot mouth. 

"Jesus, Ronan," he gasps out, breath punched out of him, and the way Ronan grins at him with his lips still wrapped around his cock sends every last strand of coherent thought flying out the window. Ronan sucks, and Adam’s toes curl on the worn blanket. 

Adam ends up with one hand cradling Ronan’s head and the other fishing for Ronan’s own, holding tight to his fingers once he finds it. Ronan’s mouth is so wet, and he feels overfull; with the feeling of being back, with how touch-starved he’d been, with how Ronan isn’t even trying to hide that he’s moving his hips in short jerks as he blows him. When he looks down, Ronan is looking up at him, the endless sky reflected on his eyes. 

“Wait, I wanna--” Ronan lets his cock go maddeningly slow, and his mouth looks so red and swollen that Adam can’t help but fall to his knees in front of him and kiss him hard, his thumbs pressing down into those sharp cheekbones. 

They break away and Adam plants a wet, messy kiss on Ronan’s cheek before turning him around and dragging him closer with an arm around his waist, his other hand going down to unzip Ronan’s jeans. Ronan drops his head on Adam’s shoulder, moaning low as Adam wraps his hand around him. 

“Fuck yeah,” Ronan says, breathless. He helps as Adam keeps on tugging at his jeans, and together they lower them enough so that Adam is thrusting against Ronan’s bare ass, swearing softly at the feeling of it. 

They move together, Ronan’s arm thrown back to grab at Adam’s hair, Adam kissing messily at Ronan’s neck, their breaths erratic and visible in the cold air. 

“The way you smell, god,” Adam chokes out, and Ronan whimpers when he continues, “Kept thinking of this on the drive down.”

Adam can barely see Ronan’s face as he comes, but he can feel him tense up against him, can feel his breath leaving him all in a rush. It’s so unbearably hot, and so is Ronan dragging his ass against his dick while he’s barely got it together, Ronan falling forwards onto his elbows and dragging Adam along, urging him to keep moving. Adam thrusts against him, almost wishing he had something to fuck Ronan properly with, but he’s close enough already as he mouths at the back of Ronan’s neck, as Ronan eggs him on saying his name over and over under his breath. He comes with a silent shout against Ronan’s skin, his mind going blissfully, perfectly still for a moment. 

They stay like that as they catch their breaths, Adam almost entirely covering Ronan from the night sky. His blood is still singing, his nerves painfully awake. He never wants to move again. 

"Fuck, Adam." Ronan says, sounding wrecked. Adam hums and bites lightly at his shoulder for all answer. "Feels like you missed me, man," he adds, the swagger back in his voice.

Adam laughs and bites him again, harder this time. "I did, you asshole."

He tips them over onto their sides on the blanket, limbs still entwined, and grimaces a bit when he lands on the wet spot, much to Ronan’s mirth. He’s far too tired to care about it, though. Ronan’s dreamt fireflies are all around them, bathing everything in little spots of golden light, and with the fire flickering and the cicadas singing, it feels like a moment straight out of a fairytale. Growing up, Adam had never thought he would deserve a fairytale. 

“What have you been dreaming lately?” Adam asks, softly, nosing at Ronan’s nape. Predictably, Ronan starts playing with his hands, pinching at the sharp wrist bone before just stroking Adam’s knuckles absentmindedly. 

“Hmm, had to dream up a new watering system for the crops; it was boring as fuck, I had to study proper ones to make it legit in case I ever get audited. That was lame, so I dreamt up a little bird watching platform for Blue’s tree-slash-father.” 

“That sounds nice. And suspicious.”

“I made it neon orange.”

“And there it is.”

“Been dreaming of you, too,” Ronan says after a while. 

“Oh?”

“Brought back a hickey the other day. Sargent teased the fuck out of me.” Adam can’t help but laugh. A year and half ago, even just a year ago, he would’ve felt threatened by this dream-Adam that could touch Ronan when he couldn’t; by god-like Ronan maybe improving on the formula of original flavor Adam. By now, he’s confident that Ronan wants the real deal, ugly bits included.

“Sounds like you missed me too, Lynch.” 

“Don’t ask stupid questions. You know.” Adam nods against Ronan’s nape, puts a small kiss there afterwards. They fall quiet again, listening to the buzz of insects and Chainsaw cawing somewhere in the trees nearby, probably terrifying some mice or herding lower dream creatures to her liking. 

“Hey. Let’s not do this again,” Adam finally speaks after a long time.

“What, fucking outdoors? I know how horny Lindenmere gets you, don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

Adam snorts. “Going so long without seeing each other, shitbag.”

Ronan huffs out a breath. He brings Adam’s hand to his mouth and nibbles on his fingertips. “Yeah. Yeah, alright, let’s not.”

They stay out for a long time, until even Ronan pressed tight to him can’t stop Adam from shivering, and the sky is growing pale over their heads.

\---

“Got any plans for the weekend?” Adam asks Ronan a few weeks later as he walks to class, holding the phone up with his shoulder as he rummages for his student ID in his messenger bag.

“Yeah, it’s market day.”

“Which market?” 

“Hmm?” Ronan sounds mildly distracted, which means he could just as well be fixing a cupboard or keeping a dreamt tiger from eating him. You never know, with Ronan. “Oh. Both, actually. Farmer’s market early Friday, and before you or Declan throw a fit, no, I’m not taking the singing strawberries, I’m not an idiot.” 

Adam makes a dubious sound, but Ronan ignores him. “Fairy market’s in Philly on Saturday though. Wanna come down?” He sounds softer, more present, attention finally completely on Adam. 

Adam bites his lip. He’s got a shift at the library, but enough clout that he can beg off for one weekend. His study schedule would suffer, but even a year on he’s still anxious about Ronan actually trading in the fairy market, and would rather he had all of the backup he can. That, and he can’t deny that watching Ronan be brilliant and weird and mean to potential customers is sort of a turn on. 

“Will Declan be there?”

“Declan and Jordan, please save me from having to endure their weird foreplay about Rothko or whatever.”

“Look at you, knowing who Rothko is, so cultured.”

Ronan hangs up. He texts Adam a photo of himself flipping him off, too, for good measure. Adam lets himself smile, unseen, before he finally walks into the building. 

He gets another text halfway through his lecture, and refuses to check it on principle until class is finally over.

_I’ll make it worth your while._

He texts back, standing still on the hallway as he holds up half his class behind him. 

_You always do._

\---

What Adam wasn't expecting was for Ronan to drive up to Harvard to demand a ride down on Adam's bike.

It’s barely dawn, and Ronan looks a picture outside his apartment door, washed in blue colors from the soft light. Adam keeps thinking he’ll blink and he’ll be gone, dreamt up in the early morning, but a minute later he’s still there, solid and otherworldly beautiful in high contrast and biker boots.

“What the fuck, Lynch,” he says breathlessly, still clinging to the doorframe in surprise, but he’s already reaching out to him, dragging him into a tight hug by the front of his hoodie. 

“I can always come back when you’re decent,” Ronan says, tugging at Adam’s pajama shirt, which happens to be an absurdly old t-shirt of Ronan’s that’s so thin it might as well be nonexistent. “Or awake,” he continues with a smirk as Adam yawns right into his ear. 

“Fuck off. Come to bed.”

“Shit, Parrish, don’t gotta tell me twice.” 

They don’t fuck until much later though, after languid kisses that drift off into sighs and a nap pressed tight together on Adam’s lumpy mattress, limbs and breaths entangled.

Later, once Adam’s brain is back online, he can’t help but rib Ronan about it. “I can’t believe you drove eight hours so you can drive back five hours with me,” he tells him over his coffee, as Ronan devours scrambled eggs straight from the pan. 

“Five hours behind you on a _bike_ , Parrish, I don’t know why you wouldn’t think I’d be into that. ”

Adam rolls his eyes, but he’s absurdly pleased, and he’s not even trying to hide it as he finds little excuses to touch Ronan - handing him extra napkins, removing imaginary eyelashes off his cheek. “I could’ve been thinking of taking the Hondayota, you know.”

Ronan snorts. “Yeah, in that case I’m flying, good luck with the shitbox getting there in less than three days.” Adam privately agrees, but he’s nothing if not loyal. 

“Just for that you’re not getting to drive the bike, asshole,” he says, and steals the last mouthful straight from Ronan’s fork before heading for a shower.

The first few hours of the drive down are just as he’d pictured - Ronan hot against his back and his fingers laced tight around Adam’s belly, the whoop of his laughter as Adam gets reckless just to feel Ronan’s sharp inhale on the nape of his neck. 

The last hour is torturous only because Ronan recklessly takes his helmet off and starts nuzzling at his neck, his hands around Adam moving lower and lower until Adam finally stops by the side of the road and they take a break to roll around on the tall grass, which is stupid and undignified and the best idea ever by the time he has Ronan’s tongue in his mouth and Ronan’s hands down his pants. It goes back to feeling a bit stupid by the time he’s taking dried grass out of his hair, but Ronan looks flushed and loose under the harsh sunlight, and Adam doesn’t have it in him to regret it. 

So it’s not that bad. When they finally meet up with Declan and Jordan and the trunk filled with all of the dream things Ronan had characteristically dumped on his brother to handle when he went off in his grand romantic gesture, all parties are in a surprisingly good mood. 

“So what are you selling tonight?” Adam asks, peeking into the trunk.

“Bullshit,” Ronan says. 

“ _Safe_ things,” Declan says with an eye roll.

“Same thing,” Ronan shrugs. 

While the denizens of the magical underworld don't all know exactly why Ronan got chased around by a paramilitary organization, they all know that he _did_ , so secrecy is a bit of a moot point by now. Better to continue Niall Lynch’s legacy as a thief and collector than outright proclaiming himself a dreamer. 

Declan is livid about it, of course, which delights Ronan endlessly; and he tends to hover, which does not.

Declan looks cool and collected as they show their invites and go in to find a place to set up, but Adam can tell how tense and wary he really is. He’s seen that posture before, in the mirror, much to his chagrin.

The market is being hosted in a grand opera house this time around, ritzy and lovely and still with a brand new smell to it. It had been abandoned until a few years ago, and the photos Adam had found online had shown a decaying, crumbling building with an elegant and dignified air to it, like an old widow wearing her best jewels amongst her moth-eaten furs. To Adam, that iteration with its torn down ceilings and water stains would have fitted the absurdist feel of the fairy market a lot better than this bright, modern space with a gift shop and a lounge bar.

The main, less dangerous of the vendors are set up on the stage and the general admission area, currently empty of seats, and the stalls sprawl backstage and into the more private dressing rooms as the items or services for sale go further into the arcane, mystifying or flat out disturbing. 

Adam takes a look around while Declan and Ronan are too busy arguing to notice, walking aimlessly in between the makeshift aisles. There are stalls that sell only oil lamps and stalls that sell elixirs in old jam jars. Just backstage, in between crates and lighting equipment a man sits, silent and alone, the mere sight of him giving Adam a primal, all-consuming fear reaction he can’t quite explain. Considering the wide berth the man is being given, he can't be the only one to feel it. He has a feeling he doesn’t really want to find out what he’s selling. 

He finds a wall covered in masks in one of the first dressing rooms. The effect is haunting, if a little diminished by the life-sized promotional cardboard figures the sellers tried to hide behind some gauzy fabric. The masks come in all shapes, from childish faces to red devils to Venetian morettas, dark and featureless. The empty eye sockets look like black holes, the dark behind them unnatural, weighted in a way Adam feels down to his toes. And then there’s a mask that looks awfully familiar. 

He knows he’s seen it before, can remember it hanging in the Barns’ living room, though it hasn’t been there for years. He would think it was the same one, except this one doesn’t have tire marks on it where Ronan inexplicably decided to run his over. Only, now that he’s looking at it, the grain of the wood looks sort of like a tire pattern, and maybe if he were to just take a closer look at it...

“Adam,” Ronan says right next to him, startling him out of his reverie.

“Oh, didn’t see you there. Hey, look at this, it looks just like—”

Ronan grabs his hand before he can touch the mask. “You _really_ don’t want to touch that,” he says, and he looks scared enough that Adam lets his hand fall away.

“So I’m guessing the one on your house came from here?” he asks in an undertone.

Ronan shrugs, still looking uneasy. “Or the other way around. I really don’t know, but it gives me the creeps. I tried burning mine and it did jack shit, so I’m definitely not messing around with any more of them.”

Now that he’s not under its lure, Adam can feel how powerful the pull of the mask had been. It makes him uneasy, the demon’s possession of his hands and eyes never far from his mind. “For a moment, all I wanted was to put it on,” he says, frowning.

Ronan visibly shudders. “Yeah, please don’t. Better come back, we found a spot,” he says, and he looks relieved when Adam follows him without protest.

The pair of older women manning the mask stall glare at Ronan as they walk away. Ronan shows his teeth at them. Adam doesn’t ask. 

Being out into the main theater area feels like a relief after the dizzying rooms backstage, and Adam settles easily into helping set up. Once he finally takes a look at the stuff they're selling though, he can sort of see Ronan's earlier point. "Is this a _ruler?_ " 

"Yeah, it measures longitude, but only if you're covering your right eye," Ronan says dismissively as he digs into the suitcase of dream things. 

"Useful if you're a pirate," Jordan says, and Adam can see Declan visibly refrain himself from smiling out of the corner of his eye. His suit is particularly bland today. Jordan, in contrast, looks unforgettable in a lacy thing Adam is trying really hard not to stare at. Not for the first time, and hypocritically, he wonders at the odd couple they make. 

Also for sale they have a trash can that groans whenever you put something in it, a tea towel that never gets dirty, and a pencil that can tell when someone misspells something, among several more items of the same sort. It _is_ bullshit, if you compare it to the wondrous, miraculous things that Ronan is capable of dreaming to life. Adam can see how it rankles with him, showing party tricks when he’s capable of acts of god, how he knows subtle is the smart choice but still hates it. He can’t say that he blames him. 

Declan brought a little plastic folding table and a couple of chairs, like they’re on a fucking picnic, and after they place Ronan’s most inoffensive dreams on top of it, they have easily the shabbiest, less interesting stall - if it can even be called that - in the room. By design, it’s just what the Lynch brothers need: to belong to the magical underworld in the most low-key way possible, now that outright anonymity is out of the table. That doesn’t make it any easier to swallow.

“This is fucking depressing,” Ronan says, looking around at the soothsayers and cursed jewels being sold around them and then back at their little tableau. 

Adam puts an arm around him and pats his back. “I mean, it could be worse.”

“How?”

Adam thinks about it. “You could be working a 9 to 5 instead of selling weird shit to weird people,” he finally says. 

“Shit, I could be Declan,” Ronan says, loud enough so Declan can hear and roll his eyes. “You’re right, it _could_ be worse, I guess.” 

“Sounds like you have this covered then,” Declan says, dropping the figurine he’d been artfully arranging, not really managing to hide how much Ronan pisses him off. “Gonna go take a break. Good luck not getting swindled, I hope you can still remember how to do maths to make change.” 

“That’s what I have Parrish for!” Ronan yells after him, and Adam chuckles. 

“You don’t even mind him that much by now, do you?”

Ronan shrugs. “Can’t let him get complacent though.” 

An hour later, they've sold a Great Falls Park keychain that glows in the dark, practically indistinguishable from one Matthew got in the gift shop years ago, and have gotten a lot of disappointed stares by Niall’s old regulars. This is also by design - Declan’s design, that is, though Ronan had agreed to it with minimal grumbling. If they keep on selling trinkets, the Lynch name should invariably fade into obscurity eventually. Adam’s not sure it’ll work, mostly because he knows Ronan and because he knows that the harder you push something, the harder it pushes back. He keeps those thoughts to himself though.

By hour two, their table looks much the same, except for the presence of a shifty-looking man in a trench coat that looks like a living stereotype and keeps coming back to the table only to frown at it. He seems to agree with Ronan on the bullshit status of the stuff he’s selling, going by the pinched look he gives the tea towel. “Don’t you have anything more interesting?” he finally asks, with a look of disdain.

Ronan matches it, looking dismissive with his feet up on the table as he balances his chair on two legs. “No one’s making you buy shit, man, move along.”

“I’m sure you have something actually worth something ‘round here,” the man says, not looking bothered by Ronan’s rudeness.

“What, like a jar of _get a hint?_ I think I saw some of that two aisles over, might wanna go take a look.”

But the man still won’t go. He looks over the table with a frown on his face until he finally settles his eyes on Adam. “What about that?” he says, pointing at the watch on Adam’s wrist. 

Adam unconsciously covers the watch with his other hand, and then cringes when the man’s eyes light up at the untold confirmation of its magical status. 

“Not for sale,” Ronan says with thorns in his voice, letting his chair drop back on all fours.

“Everything’s for sale for the right price,” the man says, aiming for charming but landing on smarmy. “I’m sure we can find an arrangement that works for the both of us.”

“And I’m saying get lost, man, want it spelled out clearer?”

Ronan’s Ronan-ness isn’t really getting to the man though. He shrugs, smiling unpleasantly in a way that makes Adam want to grit his teeth.“I’m just saying. People still wanted by certain factions shouldn’t be so choosy about what they trade on.”

Adam bristles at the clear threat. There’s something about him though, something that’s niggling at Adam on the back of his head — there it is. Magic feels better with Persephone’s cards to ground him, but Adam hasn’t needed them for a long time. The connections, the energy; it’s all there for him to pull threads at when he wants to. 

“And people with such strong black magic curses shouldn’t go around making threats.” Both Ronan and the man turn to look at him with near identical looks of surprise, but where the man just seems to droop, Ronan lights up. 

Adam points his head at him. “Someone’s after you, right? And getting closer, if you’re grasping at straws.” The man visibly pales, finally losing the smug veneer. “Nothing here is saving you.”

Ronan finally looks away from Adam. “You heard him.” 

“It’s all a fucking load of shit anyway,” the man says with his mouth in a sneer, but he does finally leave. Adam can feel himself unwind as he turns tail, relaxing by increments.

When he finally looks away from the man’s retreating back, Ronan is staring unabashedly at him. “What?”

“ _Magician,_ ” Ronan says, halfway into reverent, before grabbing Adam’s chin and dragging him close for a fast, hard kiss. 

Adam smiles into it. “Are you seriously hot for me chasing someone away?”

“Aren’t I always?”

“Point.”

When Jordan and Declan finally return, she’s holding a giant tub of popcorn and is making Declan carry her easel and the lumpy bag with her painting materials. When she offers them some of the popcorn, Adam can see green paint stains on the back of her hand, can smell the turpentine around her. 

“So how’s it going boys, having a good day at the office?”

Ronan turns to smile at Adam, sharp and predatory. 

“Eh. Same old.”

\---

They spend Christmas at the Barns, the Lynch brothers and Adam and Opal and the ghosts of Aurora and Niall in the words they don’t speak and the traditions they perform as if by rote.

Christmas Day is cheerful in a way that almost feels somber, like the brothers know it _should_ be cheerful, and so then it will be, goddamnit. There are pancakes in the morning and presents afterwards and hot cocoa mugs drunk by the stupidly big tree Ronan had dreamt them up and then decorated with all of the ornaments from their childhood. He had added a few new ones, fanciful shapes of snow castles in glowing orbs that seem to enchant Matthew, who spends ages just staring at them. 

Matthew, freed from his dreamer, is a strange creature. Adam can see how much it eats at Ronan, the confusion at this new brother that has moody spells and that won’t smile nearly as bright as he used to, and the guilt at feeling so when this is what he had wanted ever since he found out he’d dreamt his kid brother up. 

Adam still grits his teeth whenever he thinks of Bryde and the Lace, but this, this worked out all right. If they had to all almost die in the process and fight a shadowy magical organization, it was worth it for how _more_ Matthew feels. More real, more solid, less dreamy. He’s more his own. 

Still, Adam can see how it trips Ronan and Declan up, both of them unsure how to be around him now. 

So they stumble around, playing board games by the fire because Aurora loved to, and eating bubble and squeak for dinner because Niall loved to, and having massive snow fights by the fields because that’s just what was done on Christmas Day, what they had always done. The Lynch baseline is tradition. 

And then there is Adam, playing along, not minding all that much because his biggest Christmas tradition was getting the hell out of the way whenever his father started drinking, not that he’s planning on sharing that. 

The day after Christmas though, Blue shows up with a gift of somewhat dodgy pie and a box of even dodgier footy teas from her family. Gansey drives down from his family’s DC home, and Jordan and Hennessy show up and look deeply suspicious of the Norman Rockwell picture that is the Barns during the holidays. 

“Crumbs, is that actual mistletoe over the doors?” Hennessy asks, looking slightly disturbed. “It thought they only had that in movies.”

“It’s tradition,” Matthew says with a shrug as he walks around handing everyone candy canes and sugar cookies. He’s wearing a santa hat, and a ferociously ugly Christmas sweater that’s not even ironic. Hennessy’s eyebrows go up. 

“Also, Ronan likes the excuse to grope Adam in public,” Blue says, and Ronan flips her off, but doesn’t deny it. Adam had blown Ronan under that same mistletoe a week before while it was just the two of them, and now he’s stuck avoiding it just so he won’t blush like a complete idiot whenever he sees it. Ronan notices of course, and keeps smirking at him, the bastard. 

The holiday feels more organic once everyone else is there, like they’re allowed to go off-script. They burn a turkey beyond recognition while distracted as they call Henry in Vancouver and end up just going straight for dessert. They jump onto piles of fluffy snow from the roof of one of the many barns dotting the property and get wasted on cranberry vodka while Opal eats one of Gansey’s gloves. Hennessy pretends she finds it all embarrassing, but no one quite believes it. 

Declan and Ronan don’t fight even once, the truest of Christmas miracles, and the holiday is pronounced a success by all. 

Once everyone else is gone, Ronan and Adam spend a few idyllic, magic-soaked days messing around in Lindenmere, winter outside the forest and whatever season they want it to be inside, chasing deer made out of light and getting soaked under Ronan’s special brand of happy-yet-sad rain. 

In just the same confused way that Ronan interacts with a Matthew that is no longer dependent on him, Adam both loves and resents Lindenmere. It's an achey, illogical feeling that he never extends to Ronan, although he knows he's figured it out. It's just familiar enough that he can almost, almost imagine he can hear the trees whisper in his deaf ear, but Lindenmere is invariably an older, darker creature, sharp and wondrous when Cabeswater had just been wondrous. 

There is no denying the thrill it gives Adam to feel the thrum of magic pulsing through the forest, though. These trees might not talk to him, but the spark of connection, the power of the ley line, still feels like a live current under his fingertips. And then there’s Ronan, wearing a sharp smile just for Adam as he conjures up glass hummingbirds that hide in Adam’s hair. Ronan breathes power in Lindenmere, looks less like a knight and more like a king, bright and all-powerful. It’s undeniably attractive.

With the Lace gone, Adam is free to scry into one of the small ponds filled with transparent fish and let his mind wander through Lindenmere, flying in between the vines and shadows and the hazy creatures too old and misshapen to have come from Ronan's imagination. It's exhilarating, and so is Ronan bringing him back to his body with a kiss to his mouth, tasting like dreamt cherries as he pushes Adam down on the soft moss before covering him with his body.

"Did you go past the canyon this time?" Ronan asks against his lips, and Adam shakes his head, wraps heavy arms around Ronan's shoulders.

They've been using Adam's scrying to do a crude survey of Lindenmere, plotting courses before they explore them physically. It's slow going, considering Lindenmere seems to have even more of a disdain for the laws of physics that Cabeswater ever did.

"There was a new shadowy place before I could reach it. And there was a herd of, well, _something_ going through it. They could feel I was there." 

Ronan frowns a bit, but doesn't push it. “I’m sure we’ll find a way to get past it in your next break,” he says, and the spell breaks.

Adam is driving up to Harvard tomorrow, and there will be no more crossing rivers on bridges of floating mirrors and glowing Christmas ornaments and, more importantly, no more Ronan, no more early morning sleepy hellos and late night mumbled conversations. 

It must show on his face, because Ronan is already leaning down when Adam says “Come here,” and drags him closer.

The kiss starts slow, almost drowsy, trading breaths as Adam sucks on Ronan’s bottom lip, one hand against his skull and another roaming down his back. The smell of Ronan and moss and rain surrounds Adam like a well-loved blanket, soothing and a turn on all at once. He hooks one of his legs around Ronan’s hip, but there’s no real urgency, just touch and comfort as they kiss unhurried underneath shivering trees. 

It starts snowing, probably the grounding reality of their lives outside this forest influencing how it shows itself, but they still don’t move, other than Ronan blanketing Adam even further from the cold. 

Ronan kisses Adam’s top lip, then the bottom one, before nuzzling at his nose. There’s a thread of spit still joining their mouths, and Ronan’s eyes look electric in the dim light. 

“Maybe I can scry into Lindenmere from Cambridge,” Adam says, rubbing slow circles onto Ronan’s lower back. “We could meet here.”

Ronan rolls his eyes and knocks his forehead gently against Adam’s. “Or you can keep that sorry head there where it belongs while no one’s around to spot you. Don’t break yourself on my account, Adam.”

“It’s not for you, it’s for me - it’s selfish, you see? I miss you too much,” Adam says, feeling raw, and Ronan, marvelously, colors up, the way he does whenever Adam does something to remind him that he’s just as stupid over Ronan as Ronan is on him. 

Ronan leans down for a quick nip at his earlobe. “Sometimes I can’t believe I didn’t make you up,” he says, reverent.

Adam makes a show of glancing around them, at the crooked trees towering over them and the glass hummingbirds and the banners made out of music notes swinging from branches over their heads.

“I think that’s my line, Lynch.” 

“Yeah, ok, I’ll let you have it for a bit.”

“Oh, thank you, that’s so kind of you,” Adam says, dry, and Ronan grins at him.

“I aim to please.” Adam snorts and drags him down to lick into his mouth.

Adam has spent half his life wanting to run as far away from this state as possible, and now all he craves is the solid body over his anchoring him to this wild forest of dreams and whimsy. It’s hard to reconcile, sometimes, but Adam has always been a contrary person. 

By the time they walk out of Lindenmere, their lips are red and puffy and there are leaves in Adam’s hair but Ronan’s hand in his feels firm and warm, his steady pulse under Adam’s thumb a homing beacon so he can always find his way back home again.

\---

For Valentine’s Day, Ronan sends him a jar with the sunset at the Barns. It's the kind of thing that hurts his head when he tries to think about it, so he just takes it at face value. It is a jar, and inside it there is a sky and a sun perpetually going down and tinting everything in a two feet radius in a wash of pinks and purples and blues. When he opens it, the smell of the Barns at nightfall fills the room.

Adam can't stop staring at it. 

Considering they have never even acknowledged Valentine’s Day in all the time they’ve been together, Adam can safely say that he’s surprised. 

When he calls Ronan later that night, he opens with: “I thought you agreed with Blue that Valentine’s Day is a made up consumerist excuse to worship at the altar of capitalism.”

“Damn right I do,” Ronan says, incensed. He pauses, and then adds in a smaller voice, “Don’t tell her I said that though.”

Adam snorts. “Well, I didn’t get you anything,” he says, fidgeting with a crumpled receipt in his jeans pocket.

His roommates are very loudly playing Mario Kart in the living room, so he’s gone outside to call, which he’s starting to regret now that he can feel himself slowly freezing. Cambridge in February is stark and colorless and wet, naked trees dark against the gray sky, like all the color allotted for the year gets saved up for the glorious New England fall, leaving just crumbs for the rest of the seasons. 

“Whatever, Parrish, it’s not tit for tat. I swear I wasn’t thinking of the date, I just dreamt it and thought you’d like it. It’s not that deep.”

“It’s always deep with you.”

He can picture Ronan eye rolling. “Only because you make it. Send me a pair of your underwear then, and we’ll call it even - hell, send yourself with nothing but a giant bow, I’ll take it.”

Adam laughs. “I’m sure you would.” He starts stomping his feet to get circulation back to them, wondering if he should go back inside for a scarf. "How’s things there?” 

Ronan’s smoker’s breath is just as expressive through the phone. “One of the cows gave birth to a green calf, it was both gross and great. Can’t really sell it now though.”

They talk about the regular minutia of their days for a while longer: Adam’s sociology paper due for next Monday and the fact that Chainsaw has been stealing unattended shoes from the neighbors - impressive, considering the nearest neighbors are a good mile away. Adam’s useless teammates in a group assignment are bitched about; a picture of the green calf is provided. 

The sun starts going down, the barest of pinks tinting the gray sky, and Adam can’t help but think of the jar in his bedroom holding the watercolor wash of the Virginian sunset, the same one Ronan must be looking at right now as he probably sits on his front porch stairs. In his mind, the jar feels like a long, delicate string tying them together.

“Ronan, thanks. For the present,” Adam says before hanging up. “ _Tamquam—_ ”

“ _—Alter idem,_ ” Ronan says, the way he always does, like he’s saying magnitudes in those two words, like he’s baring his soul. It never stops being thrilling to hear.

Adam’s 99% sure Ronan was joking about the underwear, but he does end up sending him one of the Harvard t-shirts he’d been given during orientation. Ronan never mentions it, but Adam catches him wearing it the next time he shows up on the Barns by surprise.

\---

Sometimes though, sometimes Ronan drives him crazy.

"What do you mean you bought me a new laptop? What the fuck?" Adam says angrily into the phone, too pissed off to even think about whispering, despite being just outside one of the administrative buildings. He gets a couple of looks, not that he cares right now.

"Christ, Parrish, I thought we were past this bullshit. You’re the one that’s been bitching about his dead laptop for a week, you _know_ you need it, just be chill about it.”

"I can buy my own shit," Adam says, feeling that old familiar dust rising in his throat, choking him up. 

"Yeah, and lose a bunch of sleep and be a raging asshole for weeks when you work yourself to the bone to do it."

"I do _not_ need my boyfriend to keep me in comfort, Ronan, it's bad enough that—" he cuts himself off before he can finish that sentence, but Ronan hears it anyway.

"What, bad enough that _what_ , Parrish," he says, poisonous like he rarely is these days.

It’s bad enough that Adam is getting used to it, to going grocery shopping with Ronan during breaks and not checking for the price of anything, to waking up warm in winter because the heat is always on and walking on his sock feet around a beautiful old house and feeling like he’s home.

"Nevermind."

"Oh no, you wanted to overanalyze shit, overanalyze away, boy genius.”

“That I’m getting used to it, all right?” 

“Jesus Mary,” Ronan says, and Adam can picture him right now, exasperated and rubbing at his eyes. It only makes Adam angrier.

“Fuck off, I’m supposed to be able to do this alone.”

Ronan lets out an irritated sigh. “Get this into your thick head, Adam— you’re not alone. _Tamquam,_ ” he adds, like a bite, and then hangs up before Adam can even think about finishing the sentence. 

if he was Ronan, if he was someone else that didn’t need to worry about a dead computer and the three new overpriced books he needs to buy, he would throw his stupid phone against the brick wall of the bulding beside him. Instead, Adam grits his teeth and kicks at a loose piece of gravel, wanting to bury his head somewhere and scream. 

They don’t speak for a few days, the fight clear in his mind, so it shouldn’t really surprise Adam when he gets home and there’s a Dell box waiting for him, but it still does. He stares at it for a long time, arms crossed over his chest, and then goes and makes dinner and purposefully avoids it for the rest of the day, dancing around it like it’s not taking up most of the space in the rickety dining table. 

He leaves it there for another day, until Mark, his less annoying roommate, finally gets fed up and asks if he can have it seeing that Adam clearly won’t. Adam frowns and mentally rearranges his annoying roommate ranking before going at the box with scissors like it personally attacked him. 

He then takes the offending laptop to his desk and stares at it for a long time. It’s… fine. It’s not top of the line. The model is a couple of years old and the specs are ok but not impressive and it comes with nothing installed, so it’ll be a bit of a hassle to get it working as Adam needs it. It’s exactly the kind of computer Adam would have bought for himself, and it both pisses him off and elates him that Ronan can know him so well. 

He rests his forehead against the desk and lets out a slow breath. It’s just a middle of the road laptop, not a trip to the Bahamas. He _had_ been planning to take two extra shifts per week to afford it. And more importantly, Ronan is right— he’s not alone.

They’ve been a unit for long enough that Adam hardly questions it anymore. He can accept help from Ronan because he knows he himself would drop everything to help Ronan in return, has in fact done it before and will do it again. It’s just hard to reconcile that with the Adam that feels like he doesn’t deserve anything he hasn’t earned by himself. 

_You’re such an asshole,_ he finally texts Ronan. _Thank you._

_Pot, meet kettle,_ Ronan texts back. 

\---

Adam’s dreams of St. Agnes are strangely lucid, considering they’re filled with shadowy branches and thorns and fluttering feathers. Sometimes he’s just sitting at his desk, endlessly studying for a test that never gets nearer. Some others he’s staring at the front door, frozen in place as the door handle rattles and his father yells outside.

The best ones though, the ones he actually looks forward to, all start with him on his bare mattress and Ronan lying on the floor beside him, his presence filling the room to the brim, easily commanding Adam’s attention just in the way he used to do in those hazy nights before they found Glendower. 

Adam had secretly loved those nights. There had always been such a thread of possibility hiding in the shadows, Ronan’s heavy gaze on him and the soundtrack of their breathing and the breeze from the open window against the stifling heat. 

In the dream, he lets himself roll softly off the mattress on top of Ronan, the way he'd wondered about when Ronan stayed over but never allowed himself to do. Ronan looks even paler in the moonlight, but his eyes darken as Adam leans down to kiss his red mouth. 

Ronan kisses back not as the man that shares his bed during school breaks, but as the boy he once was, infatuated and inexperienced and eager. Like he might have done, if Adam had allowed himself this sooner. 

In Adam’s dreams, Cabeswater is still humming in his deaf ear, vines tangling around them, tying them together in the dark as magic pulses to the beat of their thundering hearts. Ronan tastes like the wind as a bird plummets down in hunt, like the dew pooling on leaves in early October, like gasoline on tarmac. It’s not logical, but nothing in dreams is. 

Ronan says his name, over and over, pressing up into Adam’s body, driving Adam crazy, making him want nothing more but to climb inside this boy and stay there, safe in the flowering space between his ribs. He bites at Ronan’s neck, mumbles all the words he still finds difficult to say to the real Ronan, pants heavy as Ronan takes his fingers into his mouth, expression full of worship.

Ronan’s fingertips finally dip beneath the waistline of his threadbare pajamas, and he wakes up with a gasp, blood rushing in his ears and cock hard between his legs. 

He rolls over with a groan and swears into his pillow, still breathing hard. It’d felt so real. 

His phone rings, and his pulse skyrockets with the certainty that it’s Ronan. 

“Were you scrying?” comes Ronan’s scratchy voice, still dripping sleep, low and all Adam wants right now.

“Maybe? Not consciously, I was dreaming of you, I—”

“St. Agnes, in the dark,” Ronan cuts in, breathing fast, and Adam moans without meaning to.

“Jesus, Adam. Are you still…?”

“Yeah.”

“Touch yourself. For me.” Adam does, helpless against that voice, bites his lip when he can hear Ronan doing the same. “Did you want to, back then? When I slept on your floor and you complained about me distracting you from homework?”

“ _Fuck_. Yes, but I tried not to think about it too much.”

“It would drive me crazy to have you so close. The way you smelled... I wanted you to touch me so bad, kept hoping you’d wake up horny, like this, and make an exception, get curious, I don’t know. Whatever you wanted to give.”

That sounds awfully lonely, Ronan wanting scraps when he deserves universes, but Adam is close enough that he can’t really focus on it right now, can only think of the desperate tint to Ronan’s voice.

“Ronan. Ronan, I kept having to jump over you to go jerk off in the bathroom all summer long. You were always _there_ , and when you weren’t you were all I could think about.”

Ronan comes, sounding choked up over the phone, and Adam isn’t far behind, his toes curling as his vision whites out. 

They stay silent for a while, as their breaths even out, and then Ronan starts laughing. “I can’t believe we just had psychic phone sex.”

Adam laughs too. “Honestly I can’t even say I’m that surprised.” 

“This is probably stupid but I’d be down with practicing this,” Ronan says, sounding pleased and relaxed in the way he always is after sex, and Adam wishes so bad he could be there to touch him. 

“Mmm, I’ll bet.” He yawns, eyes falling shut as he starts feeling sleepy again, until he remembers Ronan’s earlier words. “Hey. You know why I never made a move back then, right? I didn’t want it to just be curiosity or whatever. I wanted to be sure.”

“I know.” Ronan’s voice sounds very small, dreamy.

“Do you really?”

“If I hadn’t, I do now. You’re gone over me enough to magically scry into my dreams, Parrish. I know I’m not alone in this.”

“Good. That’s good. Because you’re not.” 

“If we’re done with the Leia and Han moment you should probably go back to sleep,” Ronan says, and Adam snorts, but he does clean up as much as he can without having to get out of bed. 

“Romance is dead, I guess.” 

“Well maybe if you’re good you’ll get to dream of me again.”

Adam smiles into the phone, already feeling himself go under. 

“Yeah. Maybe I will.”

\---

Somehow, it gets around that Adam can read tarot cards. It bothers him at first, because it goes so against the image of the Harvard student Adam has constructed for himself, until he realizes that half his classmates blame bad grades on Mercury retrograde and only say it jokingly part of the time. So he doubles down on the tweed and ignores it, mostly.

That works until he gets invited to a party only to realize when he gets there that there are pentagrams, and a cauldron, and _so many_ crystals, what the fuck. Someone’s wearing a _robe_. Adam, used to scrying into flat coke in a Rudolph the reindeer bowl he got at the dollar store, can feel his eye twitch as he gets saged to within an inch of his life. 

He surreptitiously takes a photo to send Ronan and gets back an uncharacteristic voicemail he doesn’t listen to until hours later, consisting of just Ronan laughing for a minute straight until the beep cuts him off. 

He sends it to Blue as well and she writes back with a scornful _Amateurs_. He can’t say he disagrees. 

He’s just about to make his excuses to Julia, the girl on his Physics class that had invited him, when he gets mobbed by the kid in the stupid robe. 

“Hey! You know tarot, right? Julia says you're aces at it.” 

Adam has no idea how Julia knows that. “Um. Sorta, I guess,” he says, and the kid lights up.

“I’ve been practicing but I wanted to do a reading with someone that knows their stuff better than I do, better to learn by example and all that.”

“Well, I was just about to go, got an early day tomorrow—”

“Come on, just a fast reading,” says the kid, looking eager and far too young, even though Adam can’t be that much older than him at all. It’s like kicking a puppy. Adam sighs and finally nods. They end up sitting on the floor in the middle of the room, next to a group of girls smashing weed and edible flowers together in a mortar that looks like it could’ve been used as a prop in Charmed.

The kid does a show of shuffling the cards, and Adam sighs and closes his eyes as he puts his hand over them. They feel different from Persephone’s, but there’s still a thread of connection at the edge of his mind when he cuts the deck. 

The kid turns a card, theatrically and with enough flair that his sleeve is in danger of catching fire from one of the many, many candles littering the floor. 

The moon. Illusion, intuition, the unconscious, longing. 

_Longing._ He closes his eyes and there is Ronan in the Barns’ kitchen, drinking coffee in the early morning light, rumpled and grumpy as he stares outside the window. He thinks of tasting his sleep-warm skin. He thinks of a Harvard degree in his hands and shoes that have never been covered in dust. Adam is a creature of hunger. 

“Oh, that’s—” the kid starts saying, but Adam cuts him off.

“I know.”

“Oh, um, ok. Take the next card?”

It’s the moon again. 

The kid looks confused. “I thought they only had one of each in the deck?” he says, hesitantly.

“Maybe you bought a crap one,” Adam says, drily. “Take another one.”

The moon again. 

By now, the entire room is muttering, all eyes on Adam. The kid is frowning down at the cards. “I’m sure there was only one moon card. It’s not even a new deck.”

Adam shrugs. “I thought you wanted to see a magic trick?” 

The kid stares at him for a moment too long before turning the entire deck and spreading the cards in a wide arc in front of him, moving candles out of the way as he does so. They are all the moon.

The mutters all die. The silence extends long enough that Adam starts wondering if this was a bad idea and if he’s going to personally kick off a new round of witch trials in Massachusetts, but then someone knocks over a glass of cheap red wine on the carpet and people are rushing to find paper towels and looking up cleaning DIYs on their phones and the moment passes. 

“Well will you look at the time,” Adam drawls, more to himself than anything, and this time no one stops him as he makes a speedy retreat.

The air feels cold and clean outside, a relief after all the incense and sage, so he walks home, taking the long way round. There’s enough starlight for Adam to see the sharp lines of the moon card he stole while no one was looking. 

He last saw Ronan for Spring Break a week ago, and more than quenching the thirst it’d just made the longing worse. They’d spent most of the break dicking around in Lindenmere, creating tiny planets in bubbles for Opal to chase and fucking in shadowy clearings. Adam can almost taste Ronan and the magic both like honey lingering in his mouth.

Once he gets home, he pins the tarot card on his corkboard, next to the photo of Gansey and Blue and Cheng tiny against a redwood tree and the one of Ronan looking surly and mid recrimination while playing and losing to Declan in Monopoly - taken sneakily from behind Matthew while Ronan had been distracted. The jar of sunsets throws a soft glow of pink all around the desk beneath it. If someone had asked Adam at sixteen if he would ever miss his hometown, he’d have laughed in their face. And yet. 

It’s not like his reputation as a sort of weird, sort of uncanny person gets better after that, but at least he doesn’t really get invited into magic-lite parties anymore, which he counts as a win.

\---

Adam doesn’t notice it at first, but Ronan starts testing how far and for how long he can go from the Barns.

He doesn’t think much of the extra trips he’s taking to see Adam, just happy to have him around to play with Adam’s hair as he studies for midterms. The visits to Gansey in New Haven are less typical, but not that strange considering Blue has been using Ronan as her personal taxi service. The dreaming camping trip with Hennessy is somewhat weirder, but really the one that finally surprises Adam is when he flies to Colorado with Declan for that month’s fairy market. 

Still, Adam’s busy. He pities the poor bastard stuck sharing a seat row with the Lynch brothers and puts it aside in his mind to wonder about later when he has leftover energy from homework. He loves the work, but his sophomore year has been intense in a way he hadn’t expected. 

He finally figures it out a Sunday morning in early April, waking up with Ronan beside him for the second weekend in a row. Adam goes up to his elbows and blinks at him, making connections in his head.

“I can feel you staring,” Ronan says, groggy and with his eyes closed, though he does open them wide when Adam puts his index finger under his nose to check for the nightwash he can already see isn’t there. 

“What the—”

“How long has it been since you dreamt?” Adam asks, and Ronan harrumphs and stretches like a cat, long and full-bodied, clearly avoiding the question. 

“Mmm,” he says, scratching at his belly. Adam raises his eyebrows. “Friday before I drove up, okay? It’s fine, Jesus.”

“Are you sure you’re good to stay today? Maybe you should be going already.”

“Wow, way to make a guy feel wanted, Parrish.”

Adam rolls his eyes, but he does lie back down and throws a leg over Ronan. “You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, and I’m telling you it’s fine. I mean it.” Ronan looks serious, like he really does mean it and isn’t just saying it, and Adam’s hunch is confirmed.

“You’re testing it, aren’t you? How long you can spend before having to dream.” 

Ronan shrugs, one-armed. “Thought you’d approve of me using the scientific method.” At Adam's look, he adds, “You knew it’d gotten better.”

“Yeah, but not that you were actively messing with it,” he says with a sigh. Still, he _is_ curious. “What’s your range now?”

“Five days without dreaming, a week away from the Barns.” The fact that he’s got the numbers right on the tip of his tongue tells Adam that he’s really serious about it. “It’s expanding, though.” 

“Side effects?”

“Not really? I’m not being stupid about it, I swear, if I feel it coming I just dream, I’m back in control without Bryde’s bullshit in my head.”

Adam hums. The early light makes Ronan’s eyes look transparent, shockingly bright. He’s warm and a little sweaty from sleep, and he’s been wreaking havoc with Adam’s study schedule but he’s also been letting him use him as a sounding board for essays. Adam has been so glad to have him around so often that he hadn’t really stopped to wonder about it. 

“Okay,” Adam finally says.

Ronan narrows his eyes. “Just okay?”

“Yeah. I trust you if you say you’re doing it properly.” At Ronan’s sceptical look he adds, “Also, I’ll tell Gansey if you don’t, and then he’ll be sad at you, so it’s up to you.”

“That’s low, Parrish,” Ronan says, but he’s already rolling Adam under him, smirk firmly in place in victory. 

“All’s fair, and all,” Adam says, right up against Ronan’s lips when Ronan leans down. 

“Crazy bastard,” Ronan says, sweet and low, and then they don’t speak any more until Chainsaw decides she’s hungry and bored of hanging out in Adam’s living room and flies over their heads obnoxiously until they get up. 

They go for pancakes, boys and bird, much to the annoyance of the staff, and bribe her with bits of sausage just so she won’t make a huge scene. Adam wonders when he started finding this charming instead of mortifying. It should probably bother him more that he can’t really tell.

That night, when he presses Ronan against the BMW’s driver’s side door and kisses him long and hard goodbye, he finds himself clinging a bit. “You _will_ be careful, right?” He presses their foreheads together, as Ronan draws circles on the sensitive skin of his hip with his thumbs. 

“I will, yeah. I’ll share my notes with the rest of the class, and everything,” he says, though the levity isn’t really there. He smacks a loud kiss to the corner of Adam’s mouth. “It’ll work.”

Adam bites his lip, but he just nods and lets Ronan go. 

_It’ll work._ Maybe. Hopefully. Because Adam still wants it far too much.

\---

Ronan sends him a set of coordinates in the mail along with a key wrapped in a cloud - a literal cloud, fluffy and thundering and with a tendency to rain in the weirdest moments. The key is already tarnished from the humidity. It’s a wonder the package got to him at all, the cardboard damp around the corners.

It’s a Friday nearing May, almost at the end of term, and Adam can feel his heart trying to claw out of his ribcage when he looks up the location on google as the cloud floats around his room. 

The coordinates lead to a second floor apartment on the edges of Cambridge, almost in Boston proper. The neighborhood is far from picture perfect but there is a row of tall maple trees going all the way down the street, laden with bright green leaves that move slowly in the breeze. 

The key, of course, fits perfectly in the lock. A thought starts taking shape in Adam's head, that he refuses to give voice to. 

Ronan is standing in the middle of the empty living room, looking incongruous against the cream interiors with his ripped jeans and tattoos and the raven on his arm. 

The shape in Adam's head solidifies a bit more.

" _Atom!_ " Chainsaw cries before taking flight for Adam's shoulder. She nips delicately at his earlobe, but her weight barely registers as Adam takes in the airy windows, the gleaming hardwood floors, Ronan’s car keys laying casually on the kitchen counter. 

"Hey," Ronan says, with the small smile that makes Adam want to sail ships and start wars for him.

"Hey. What's going on?" Adam asks, still frozen by the door. 

Ronan's smile grows larger. "You know already," he says, raising his eyebrows at him. "Big brain and all."

Adam finally walks in, takes a meandering path around the living room and open floor kitchen, his eyes roving over every surface, before Ronan catches him by the waist and pulls him closer, making Chainsaw flutter away with a squawk of outcry in the process. 

“So,” Ronan says, almost nonchalantly, but Adam can tell how nervous he really is. 

Adam is finding it hard to put words together. “Got tired of being a farmer?” he finally asks, and then wants to take it back, because _who cares_ , that’s not the point, why would he even say that when the only single thought in his head is, _please be real. Please don’t take this away._

Ronan snorts. “A little bit. Company’s shit, for one thing.” 

“You shut your mouth about Chainsaw.”

“Oh, Chainsaw agrees with me. Keeps babbling on about you all the time,” Ronan says, and Adam can hear all the words he’s not saying as well. “Plus, easier being a magical criminal from the city.” 

There’s a beat of silence. “Okay. Okay, someone’s got to actually say it — are you really moving here?” 

“Well, I was hoping _we_ would, you know. You said your lease is ending in May. And there’s that internship. And stuff.” Ronan doesn’t look away from him as he speaks, but he’s clenching his jaw, readying himself from disappointment even as Adam clings unsteadily to his t-shirt.

“What about the Barns?”

“What about it? It’s not going anywhere. Our home’s there for when we need it,” Ronan says, though Adam has a hard time processing anything after that casual _our_. _Our home, our home, our home,_ goes a small, dazed voice in the back of his head.

“And the nightwash?”

“I’ll have to do road trips often, not gonna lie. But it’s almost under control.”

“Christ, Ronan.” Adam knows that he probably looks wrecked as he stares up at Ronan, though in his defense, Ronan looks somewhat breathless too. 

“Well? Will you finally say something?” Ronan asks, obviously running out of patience.

“What’s there to say? Don’t make that face. Of course I want you nearer. Of course I want to live with you.”

Ronan swoops in to kiss him, long and messy, until their lips are stinging with stubble burn and they’re just brushing lips, swaying gently in the middle of the empty room with the maple trees outside painting shadows over them. 

“Fuck, Parrish, could’ve said that sooner, you’re bad for my blood pressure.”

Adam laughs and knocks his head gently against Ronan’s. “Someone’s gotta keep you on your toes, Lynch. Might as well be me.” 

“Might as well, I guess.” Ronan’s stroking his lower back under Adam’s shirt, making the hair on his arms stand up. He smells like the road and a bit of sweat and like home, absolutely mouth-watering. 

“Hey,” Adam says after a while. 

“Mmm?”

“I’m paying rent.”

Ronan rolls his eyes. “I know.”

“I mean it,” Adam says.

“I know you do, Parrish, it’s fine, you can also vacuum and I’ll do dishes, it’s _fine,_ okay, I know you.” He says it offhandedly, like it’s not a big deal, and even though Adam has known himself _seen_ for years now, it still always manages to strike him. 

Ronan knows him, and he still wants him, and now he’s living in Cambridge and Adam will never have to wake up without Ronan’s nose digging into the back of his neck again. He grabs Ronan’s face between his hands and kisses him again, and again, until he feels dizzy with how much he wants him, wants _this_ , Ronan and Harvard and magic and a future, together. 

“Oh, yeah, there’s another thing,” Ronan says after a long while. “In the study.” He points his head at one of the closed doors. Adam gives him a suspicious look, wondering for a second if he’s gonna find a brand new car or a horse with wings there - it’s been that kind of day. 

What he finds, instead, is a sapling growing in the middle of the room, vibrant with the magic Adam can feel is Lindenmere’s even without touching it. 

“What,” Adam manages, eloquently. “How did you get it up here?”

“I dreamt it here, it should help with the nightwash. I asked Lindenmere and it agreed almost suspiciously fast. Opal says she better be allowed to visit, by the way. You better hide anything you don’t want eaten.”

“It feels - it feels like the ley line, the one in Henrietta. I didn’t think the energy could reach all the way up here.”

“I had Gansey run some things for me - apparently Anglo-Saxon poetry is interesting and all but it’s no Welsh kings, so he could make time. It's supposed to be mostly aligned with our ley line, though I’m sure you’ll be able to know for sure.” 

Adam hums. “It’ll get along great with the cloud you sent, last I checked it was raining on my history notes.” Ronan laughs softly and puts his arms around him from behind, presses a kiss to his neck before resting his chin on Adam’s shoulder.

They stare at the sapling together, at the way the light makes its leaves shine translucent, at the way moss gathers in the nooks and crannies of its crooked trunk; at the thread-like roots spreading across the hardwood floors and clinging to bits of drywall. The roots don’t seem to go anywhere, not on a second floor with no earth to speak of, but the tree is still standing there, illogical and beyond beautiful and probably ready to make it hell on the wheels of any unsuspecting office chair. Dust motes flutter around it, golden in the light. It looks at home. 

“Well. I guess we’re not getting our deposit back.”

**Author's Note:**

> I was really into TRC back in the day, but CDTH hit me hard over the head and I've thought of little else since like March. You can also find me in [twitter!](https://twitter.com/nekare_ish)
> 
> All I know of tarot I learned from google. Sorry.


End file.
